CarlyConners
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2017
- Posts
- 206
"Queen of the Heavens"
(closed)
(closed)
"Excuse me, my queen."
Isa turned to look to the door of her chambers where she found one of her officers with his head bowed and gaze on the floor. She waved away the dozen female servants tending to her dressing and feeding, asking, "Status?"
"Final approach, my queen," he said, his gaze still on the deck. "The braking procedure using the satellite's--"
She waved off his explanation, uninterested in hearing the details of how her ship was being slowed from nearly the speed of light to the significantly lower speed necessary to achieve a synchronous orbit over their destination. The ship had used the gravitational pull of two of this system's planets to slow significantly, then repeated the procedure in orbit of their destination's own moon. From here to the destination, with the ship essentially flying backward, the engine's would fire for two days, slowing it significantly further. And finally, in the pull of their destination's gravity, the flight would come to an end with Isa looking down upon her final destination ... upon yet another of her territories ... upon the planet they called Gaia.
Despite his gaze still being on the floor before him, the officer had seen his queen's gesture in his peripheral vision. He went silent. As she approached him slowly, the point on the floor at which his gaze was set moved closer to his feet until he was literally looking at the tips of his shoes. It was forbidden for a male -- whether of their own race or of that of the planet that would soon be below them -- to look directly at the queen while she was in her private quarters. Men had had body parts cut from them one by one and fed to them over very lengthy periods of time for such a violation. And this officer was very fond of his ears, fingers, toes, and ... well, particularly that.
"Come to me when we are in stationary orbit," she ordered in her typically soft voice and slow cadence. "You are dismissed."
He bowed his head even further, backed a couple of steps, turned, and departed, raising his gaze to find his path but leaving his head down until he knew he was safely out of her view. He didn't do this because he was afraid of his queen. He did it out of respect. As he hurried off toward the ship's bridge, he recalled the staff meeting they'd had about how the people of Gaia would have to be once again reminded as to how they interacted with their queen. It would be brutal initially. But ... they'd learn. Learn or die anyway.
Back in her quarters, Isa returned to her cryobed to rest. Her attendants set the controls to slow her metabolism: the affect would be that she would feel virtually no passage of time between now and achievement of orbit. It wasn't the same as being in stasis, as she had been for almost 500 of Gaia's years. No, this was the stasis version of taking a nap. It would take yet another twenty-two days for the ship to slow to a geosynchronous orbit over the planet. It would enter Earth's upper atmosphere and literally burn through the sky for a hundred or more orbits opposite of that of the sun and moon beyond it, slowing and slowing until finally it could be lifted back up into the very extremes of the atmosphere where it would be stationary in the sky until time to once again return to the heavens.
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